BBC - Culture - Cabaret Voltaire: A night out at history's wildest nightclub 7/30/16, 1:04 PM

Cabaret Voltaire: A night out at history's wildest nightclub

In 1916, a young Romanian artist called Marcel Janco produced a painting depicting an
evening in a Zurich nightclub. Now lost, but known through a photographic reproduction
on a postcard, the picture presents a riotous scene in the fractured style of early Cubism.

A group of performers, centre-stage, make strange, unnaturally angular shapes with their
bodies. They seem to be responding to the music of a nearby pianist, who tips back his
chair, while remaining hunched over his keyboard. The audience, meanwhile, is a raucous,
drunken mob. Sitting at tables scattered around the auditorium, they laugh, yell, point,
and jabber. Above them, over the stage, an ominous, skull-like visage a mask possibly
inspired by African tribal art keeps watch. Next to it, like a banner placed prominently
above the pianist, a single word Dada is legible in the gloom.

Marcel Jancos painting of a night in the Cabaret Voltaire from 1916 now survives only in a
reproduction on a postcard (Credit: Marcel Janko)

This, of course, is the name of the revolutionary cultural movement that electrified Europe
a century ago. And it all began in this cramped nightclub, which hosted an entertainment
that lent its name to Jancos painting the Cabaret Voltaire.

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BBC - Culture - Cabaret Voltaire: A night out at history's wildest nightclub 7/30/16, 1:04 PM

According to its co-founder, the German poet Hugo Ball (the pianist in Jancos painting),
Janco was present for the opening night of the Cabaret Voltaire, on 5 February 1916. The
place was packed, Ball noted in his diary. Whatever occurred that night clearly excited
the audience of artists and bohemians, since, not long afterwards, Ball made another
entry in his diary: Everyone has been seized by an indefinable intoxication. The small
cabaret is about to come apart at the seams and is going to be a playground for crazy
emotions. Jancos painting memorably captures the intoxication and crazy emotions
that the Cabaret Voltaire unleashed.

Today, the Cabaret Voltaire is still going strong in the same building in the Swiss city
where it first began. Earlier this year, it marked the centenary of Dadas foundation by
initiating a vibrant daily programme of performances and events. Recently, I visited the
venue and spoke to its director, Adrian Notz, to find out how this modest, medieval
building, in Zurichs old town, came to witness the birth of one of the most important
avant-garde movements of modern art.

Hugo Ball was a theatre director and

Switzerland is a birdcage, surrounded by roaring lions
Hugo Ball philosopher who came to Switzerland
from Munich, Notz explains. Ball was accompanied by Emmy Hennings, a cabaret singer
whom he later married. Like many other artists, writers and intellectuals, such as James
Joyce, Ball and Hennings were exiles drawn to Zurich because it was a safe haven during
the dark days of World War One. Switzerland is a birdcage, surrounded by roaring lions,
Ball wrote. Swiss neutrality also attracted pacifists and political revolutionaries, including
anarchists and socialists: indeed, Vladimir Lenin lived diagonally across the street from
the Cabaret Voltaire. As a result, Zurich had a very cosmopolitan feel during the second
decade of the 20th Century. This atmosphere was enhanced by the citys thriving
entertainment industry.

Banging tunes

To begin with, Ball and Hennings worked in one of the citys many cabarets, variety
theatres, cafes and bars, where incendiary ideas were often debated. By early 1916, they
had resolved to open a cabaret of their own, which Ball hoped would be a centre for
artistic entertainment. The venue they selected was the intimate back room of the
Hollndische Meierei, a popular restaurant-cum-tavern at Spiegelgasse 1, not far from
another cabaret where they had found employment. In a press release, Ball let it be known
that guest artists could come and give musical performances and readings at the daily

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BBC - Culture - Cabaret Voltaire: A night out at history's wildest nightclub 7/30/16, 1:04 PM

meetings, and he prepared for the opening night by sticking futuristic posters onto the
walls of the venue, which could accommodate around 50 people. The cabaret was named
after the 18th-Century French author of the satirical novella Candide.

Like an intense fire, the light of the Cabaret Voltaire

Janco was in the crowd that turned up for
was bright but brief the opening, accompanied by three
friends including another Romanian, the poet and impresario Tristan Tzara, who would
become an important figure within Dada. Clearly, an infectious sense of energy and
expectation was in the air, and the cabarets success prompted Ball to write to his friend
Richard Huelsenbeck, the German percussionist and poet, suggesting that he should
travel to Zurich immediately to be part of what was going on. Less than a week later,
Huelsenbeck had arrived. Upon witnessing what his friends were up to, he said that the
cabaret would be improved with the addition of Negro rhythm supplied by a large
African drum.

Balls sound poems involved typewriters, rakes and Like an intense fire, the light of the
pot covers Cabaret Voltaire was bright but brief. It
ran for six nights a week, but only until the summer of 1916. During that time, it became a
byword for outlandish performances. Janco designed ferocious, primitive-looking masks
and costumes inspired by Romanian folk art: The horror of our time, the paralyzing
background of events, is made visible, Ball said, referring to them. (One of Jancos masks
can be seen in Dada Africa, an ongoing exhibition at Zurichs Museum Rietberg.) Ball
performed sound poems (verse without words) that rejected conventional language.
There were concerts involving typewriters, rakes, and pot covers.

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BBC - Culture - Cabaret Voltaire: A night out at history's wildest nightclub 7/30/16, 1:04 PM

Jancos masks for the Cabaret Voltaire drew on influences from his native Romania as well
as Africa (Credit: Marcel Janco)

The Alsatian artist Hans Arp, who was strongly associated with Dada, and is one of the
protagonists of Schwitters, Mir, Arp, a beautiful new exhibition, commemorating the
movements centenary, at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in Zurich, described a typical night
at the Cabaret Voltaire as total pandemonium: The people around us are shouting,
laughing, and gesticulating. Our replies are sighs of love, volleys of hiccups, poems, moos
Tzara is wiggling his behind like the belly of an Oriental dancer. Janco is playing an
invisible violin and bowing and scraping. Madam Hennings, with a Madonna face, is doing
the splits. Huelsenbeck is banging away nonstop on the great drum, with Ball
accompanying him on the piano pale as a chalky ghost. We were given the honorary title
of Nihilists.

Dada nights

The performers at the Cabaret Voltaire, though, preferred a different name: Dadaists. At
some point, probably during April 1916, the word Dada was discovered. Various
members of the group have been credited with its invention. According to one account, it
was selected at random, by inserting a knife into a German-French dictionary. (Dada, in
French, is a childs word for a hobbyhorse.) However, it may also have been the result of

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BBC - Culture - Cabaret Voltaire: A night out at history's wildest nightclub 7/30/16, 1:04 PM

the Romanians Tzara and Janco repeatedly saying, Da, da! (Yes, yes!)

The culmination of the Cabaret Voltaire was an infamous performance that took place on
23 June 1916. Ball appeared onstage wearing a fantastical cardboard outfit. He then
proceeded to intone gibberish in the manner of a priest. Eventually, bathed in sweat, he
was carried down from the stage like, as he put it, a magical bishop. A celebrated
photograph documenting Ball in his absurd costume has survived.

What united all this feverish, anarchic

Shock and provocation were Dadas radical tools
activity? On one level, the Dadaists simply
wanted to attack bourgeois customs and conventions, which they believed were
responsible for the catastrophe of the Great War. While the thunder of the batteries
rumbled in the distance, we pasted, we recited, we versified, we sang with all our soul,
wrote Arp. Shock and provocation were Dadas radical tools. So were parody, buffoonery,
and vaudevillian excess.

The Cabaret Voltaire still operates as a centre for the arts to this day (Credit: Alamy)

But, says Notz, Dada was also about bringing together different styles and disciplines:
Its about having music, visual art, dance, poetry, sound poetry, manifestos, and so on, all
in one creating an event, a live performance. For Notz, Dada isnt a style in the manner

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BBC - Culture - Cabaret Voltaire: A night out at history's wildest nightclub 7/30/16, 1:04 PM

of, say, Cubism, with a readily recognisable aesthetic. Rather, its an attitude: I like to
say that Dada is questioning things, going in between things, he explains.

All cut up

The art historian Dieter Buchhart, who has curated Hauser & Wirths comprehensive
exhibition of more than 100 artworks, agrees. I would not talk about a Dada aesthetic,
because Dada is very diverse, he says. But he continues: One of the unifying elements
in visual art and poetry is the collage.

Collage is a defining feature of Dada as in this work by Kurt Schwitters but it is best
understood as an attitude rather than an aesthetic (Credit: VG Bild Kunst/ProLitteris)

This is especially evident in the work of the German artist Kurt Schwitters, who invented a
new type of picture-making that he called Merz (from the word Kommerz, which was
visible on a torn advertisement that he chanced upon while walking around his native
Hanover). Schwitters met Arp at Berlins Caf des Westens in 1918 (the two became close
friends), and his spellbinding Merz collages, incorporating scraps of commercial imagery
found on commonplace items such as ticket stubs, are often considered offshoots of
Dadaist art.

Dadaist artists such as Schwitters could

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Every generation of adolescents uses Dada as a

even be described as anti-artists, in the
device for protest and rebellion Dieter Buchhart
sense that they wished to assassinate
painting and traditional artistic techniques. Arp, who came to the fore after the initial
phase of Zurich Dada was over (the movement later spread to other places in Europe
such as Paris and Berlin), is another good example: he designed many of his
compositions by tearing or cutting rough, irregular squares of commercial paper, dropping
them, and then gluing them, wherever they landed, on a support. What unified all of the
Dada artists, continues Buchhart, is that they made a clear cut with traditional art
history and form the base of post-war and contemporary art history.

Indeed, Dadas open-endedness ensured its influence upon subsequent 20th-Century

culture: Within art, you have a kind of Dadaist heritage of Surrealism, Fluxus,
Situationism, punk, Notz says. Even the Beat generation had connections with Dada. But
Dada as a mentality or attitude that goes beyond art. Every generation of adolescents
uses Dada as a device for protest and rebellion. He smiles. Dada is almost like a religion.
Do I believe in Dada? Yes.

Alastair Sooke is art critic of the Daily Telegraph.

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